Biographical Note

Note: Biographical notes are traditionally written in the third person, but since I’m the author of this one, rather than a publicist, it seems more natural to me to set it out in the first person.

I was born in 1931 in Huntington, Long Island, grew up there, graduated from Princeton, served in the U.S. Navy, and graduated from Columbia Law School and practiced law before becoming a full-time writer. I conceived of the idea and wrote the prototype and first book for Bantam’s classic Choose Your Own Adventure series, wrote many other books in the series, and created other series and works of fiction and non-fiction, including Imagining the Universe (1994), which received a Scientific American book award. In 2016, I self-published It’s a Miracle It Wasn’t Worse,a memoir of growing up on Long Island in the 1930s and 1940s.

After thinking about the results of the November 2016 elections, I decided to write a Daily Blog focusing mainly on politics. I began posting it on this website in December 2016 and expect to continue it through the 2020 elections. Meanwhile, I’m working on a collection of essays, which I hope to have published in 2021. To bring it out earlier would amount to false advertising, because the likely title is The View from Ninety –– Things I’ve Learned That Are Good To Know.